Newsletter

Will: Stop protecting politicians

The pleasant sound you hear — the clatter of bad laws crumbling — is the edifice of campaign finance restrictions disintegrating.

Washington state provides a fresh example of the exhaustion of the “campaign finance reform” project, which tries to empower government to restrict speech about the composition and conduct of government.

The state law at issue is awful, but usefully awful: It perfectly illustrates how the political class crafts campaign regulations for the purpose of protecting the job security of members of that class — elected incumbents.

Pierce County near Seattle has an assessor-treasurer, Dale Washam, whose comportment in office has offended Robin Farris and others. The details about what Washam has done to stir a recall clamor need not concern us; courts consider whether the details are sufficiently grave before allowing a recall election to proceed.

The right of the people to vote to recall elected officials is a legacy of Western populism. Farris, a retired naval officer, and some kindred spirits have failed to gain enough signatures to force a vote to remove Washam — perhaps because of the impediments to signature gathering.

Washington state law, in order to prevent attempts to overturn elections for frivolous reasons, requires a superior court judge to have a “sufficiency hearing” to determine whether the charges against an official attain a threshold of seriousness by involving “malfeasance or misfeasance.”

This judge’s opinion can be appealed to the state Supreme Court. So a recall campaign involves significant litigation expenses. What is highly unreasonable — and unconstitutional — is the regime of restrictions on raising and spending money on recall campaigns. So say Farris and the Oldfield & Helsdon law firm, which ran afoul of state law when it volunteered to do pro bono work on behalf of Farris.

State law restricts individual contributions to most recall campaigns to just $800. This low limit is a huge impediment to buying newspaper advertising. Such advertising is necessary to collect the requisite 65,495 signatures in a county of 1,800 square miles.

It gets worse. Washington state says that lawyers who do pro bono work on behalf of a recall effort must count their time as a financial contribution subject to the $800 limit. This, too, has the effect, surely intended, of crippling recall efforts.

You almost have to admire the audacity of Washington state’s political class in writing a law that constitutes such a comprehensive attack on citizens’ First Amendment rights.

This rigging of a process threatening to the serenity of the political class is unambiguous proof that protection of that class is always a — in this case, the — purpose of government regulation of politics in the name of “campaign finance reform.”